Samba - XP clients not registering with WINS server
 

I would be most grateful if anyone could help me with this problem:

I have a samba server setup on RedHat 9 configured as a WINS server (wins support = yes). This server is also a DHCP server to the lan. All clients are WinXP Pro.

I have in my dhcpd.conf file the 'option netbios-name-servers 192.168.1.2' and it is setting this on the clients. However, whether the client have a dynamic or static ip address, for some reason the client(s) are not registering it's hostname and ip with the samba server.

If one of the client's ip changes then it never changes the entry in the wins.dat file.

Does anybody know what this could be?

First check to be sure that on the Win XP machines, under the WINS tab for the Advanced properties of TCP/IP that it's set to default (get setting from DHCP). Next run "IPCONFIG /ALL" on the Win XP machine to see what the primary WINS server is set to. If this entry is not set, then DHCP isn't working correctly. If it is set, then it's the Samba server. If it's the latter, you can try stopping Samba and deleting the wins.dat file in /var/cache/samba. This will force Samba to rebuild the WINS info.

All of the XP machines are getting the correct WINS server address from the DHCP server. I have checked this and it's correct.

I have also tried deleted the wins.dat file from the samba server, but when samba rebuilds the file, it still puts the old ip addresses of the clients in there instead of the new ones. e.g. one of the client machines was assigned a new ip address from the DHCP server (old ip 192.168.1.193, new ip 192.168.1.10) but the entry that appears in wins.dat is sill 192.168.1.193, even though the address has changed on the client. There for all of the other clients try and access the machine using the old ip address.

It's very strange, as I have set this up many times before and normally works perfectly.